Nike brand soccer balls are on display at a Nike store. A 1996 story exposing child labor in the manufacturing of soccer balls put Nike on the defensive.
Photograph: Richard Clement/Reuters

Hard-hitting activist campaigns against big corporations have become part of the sustainability landscape. Some change the world. Some change little. Telling the difference between one and the other isn’t easy.

Consider this example of a victory that is less than it seemed at the time: when the Breast Cancer Fund accused Revlon of using chemicals linked to cancer in its cosmetics, the company called the charges “false and defamatory”, demanded a retraction and threatened to sue.

Instead, last month, Revlon for the first time published an ingredients policy. The activists declared victory. “It is now one of the most comprehensive cosmetic-safety policies,” says Janet Nudelman of the Breast Cancer Fund. Renee Sharp of the Environmental Working Group, which also campaigned against Revlon, says: “They’re definitely a leader.”

So what happened? Not much, according to Revlon. The company reformulated some products to eliminate certain chemicals of concern – long-chain parabens and DMDM Hydantoin and Quaternium-15, which release tiny amounts of formaldehyde – but the company says the process was well under way before it began talking with the Breast Cancer Fund.

“This was happening,” says Alexandra Gerber, vice president and assistant general counsel. “But [the critics] helped us to realize what a poor job we’d been doing in getting the message out. The change was just the transparency.”

Transparency matters – without it, buyers of shampoo and nail polish can’t make informed choices or avoid potential allergens. But Revlon, and regulators at the Food and Drug Administration, say its products, including those using the dispute ingredients, are safe, and always have been.

Then there are game-changing battles, like the decade-long campaign waged by green groups against Indonesia-based Asia Pulp & Paper. In 2013, AP&P, as it’s known, committed to a no-deforestation policy. It went a step further last spring, promising to restore 1m hectares of natural forest and other ecosystems in Indonesia, where it is the biggest forest-products firm.

AP&P’s efforts are being monitored by respected NGOs Rainforest Alliance and The Forest Trust. The Indonesian company’s efforts have won cautious praise from Greenpeace and WWF. Rhett Butler, the founder of mongabay.com and a forestry expert, says: “The paper products giant may be abandoning business as usual for a very different approach – one that could change how forests are managed worldwide.”

So far, the signs are encouraging. Following AP&P’s commitments, Asia Pacific Resources International Limited (April), Indonesia’s second-biggest paper company, promised to stop pulping that nation’s natural forests. US food giant Cargill and Singapore-based Wilmar, the world’s largest palm-oil trader, have also taken no-deforestation pledges. At the UN Climate Summit last September, more than 150 governments, businesses and nonprofits signed the New York Declaration on Forests, committing to do their parts to halve deforestation by 2020 and end it by 2030.

If the Revlon turnaround was mostly cosmetic (pun intended) and the AP&P commitments were earth-changing, what can we learn about NGO campaigns targeted at big brands? Some produce little more than press releases, intended to generate attention and funding for activists. Others set off important changes. Here’s an admittedly subjective sampling, ranging from the important to the trivial.

Nike

It was the grandaddy of all activist campaigns. Throughout the 1990s, Nike was targeted by labor activists, campus organizers and anti-globalization forces for allowing its suppliers in poor countries to abuse and exploit workers.

At first, Nike said it couldn’t be responsible for conditions in factories it didn’t own. Protests and media reports proliferated. In 1996, Life magazine published a story headlined “Six Cents an Hour,” with a photo of a Pakistani boy sewing Nike soccer balls.

Phil Knight, who was then CEO, promised reform in a 1998 speech. “The Nike product has become synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse,” he said. “I truly believe that the American consumer does not want to buy products made in abusive conditions.”

It was slow in coming but Nike eventually set up an extensive and expensive system for monitoring and remedying factory conditions in its supply chain – and the rest of the footwear and apparel industry followed.

Today, Nike is a corporate-sustainability leader. “Our greatest responsibility as a global company”, it says, “Is to play a role in bringing about positive, systemic change for workers within our supply chain and in the industry”. On the website of the Fair Labor Asociation, a coalition of brands, colleges and NGOs, Nike makes public inspection reports from its contract factories.

Some factories in poor countries still abuse workers, of course, but the Nike campaign transformed the debate about who’s responsible, and how to make improvements.

Kimberly Clark

For five years, Greenpeace campaigned against Kimberly Clark, which makes Kleenex, Scott tissues, Huggies and Pull-Ups, accusing the company of destroying old-growth forests for throwaway products.

When they made peace in 2009, Greenpeace produced a clever video to mark the reconciliation. Today, K-C and Greenpeace continue to collaborate.

Lisa Morden, K-C’s senior director of global sustainability, says the company was moving towards sourcing more recycled and certified fiber before the activists came along, but the campaign “really did accelerate our work and our progress”. Kimberly Clark turned around when it faced defections from campus customers and reputational damage. “It was becoming challenging, commercially, for us,” Morden says.

K-C increased its use of environmentally-preferred fiber, which includes recycled and Forest Stewardship Council-certified fiber, from 54 to 83% in its global tissue-products. Richard Brooks, director of the Canadian forest program for Greenpeace, says the company’s actions have “had a ripple effect on other companies in the tissue-product sector”. For example, Procter & Gamble, which makes Bounty, Charmin and Puffs, exceeded its fiber-purchasing goals a year ahead of schedule by achieving Forest Stewardship Certification for 54% of the virgin fiber used in its tissue.

Last fall, Greenpeace Canada launched a campaign accusing Best Buy of buying paper from Resolute Forest Products, the largest and most controversial logging company in Canada, according to Brooks. Within days, Best Buy agreed to move millions of dollars worth of business away from Resolute, Brooks says.

Lego

Under the headline Save the Arctic!, Greenpeace mounted a campaign to get toymaker Lego to stop distributing its toys at Shell gas stations. “Shell has launched an invasion of children’s playrooms in order to prop up its public image, while threatening the Arctic with a deadly oil spill. We can’t let Shell get away with it,” the group said.

But to what end? Keeping Shell out of children’s playrooms won’t keep the oil giant out of the Arctic.

And while Shell’s Arctic drilling plans are risky, if not foolhardy – particularly in today’s environment of low oil prices – Shell is far from the worst of the fossil fuel companies. Shell says that CO2 emissions must be reduced to avoid serious climate change, it supports a carbon price and it is one of the very few fossil fuel companies to sign the Trillion Ton Communique.

Then again, if Shell someday judges that Arctic drilling is doing serious damage to its brand and reputation, it could decide to seek oil elsewhere.

General Mills

Anti-GMO groups like the Organic Consumers Association declared victory a year ago when General Mills announced that it would make GMO-free Cheerios. It was a small victory. Oats are the principal ingredient in Cheerios, and there are no GMO oats. General Mills made the shift by sourcing small amounts of corn syrup and cane sugar from GMO-free sources. Its Honey Nut Cheerios – which outsell the original Cheerios – continue to source GMO corn and sugar, and they are the next target of activists.

What did the Cheerios campaign accomplish? Very little. As the Cheerios website notes, General Mills makes a variety of organic cereals that are GMO-free – including Cascadian Farms Honey Nut O’s – so consumers who want to avoid GMOs can do so.

As for the non-GMO Cheerios, they no longer contain vitamin B2, also known as riboflavin, because vitamins fail the non-GMO test. In other words, Cheerios today are less healthy than they used to be.

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